Warhammer: After 18 years, finally an end

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Lovable Luciferian: Jul 10, 2007; Flashing my onyx masonic ring at 5 cent wing n trivia night at Dinglers Sports Bar - Ozma

victrix posted:

Are there any good Deathwatch novels?

I liked Deathwatch by Steve Parker but it isn't some kind of inspiration.

# ? Aug 10, 2015 16:46

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# ? May 18, 2024 16:17

Sulecrist: Apr 5, 2007; Better tear off this bar association logo.

Blood of Asaheim?

# ? Aug 11, 2015 17:32

Wax Dynasty: Jan 1, 2013; This postseason, I've really enjoyed bringing back the three-inning save.; Hell Gem

Lovable Luciferian posted:

I liked Deathwatch by Steve Parker but it isn't some kind of inspiration.

Yeah, this is your best bet.

# ? Aug 11, 2015 19:00

Emnity: Sep 24, 2009; King of Scotland

Arquinsiel posted:

If you can, get your hands on the Gorkamorka rulebooks. There's loads in the campaign section there about what doks will do to patch up an injured ork.

Gorkamorka was awesome! Oh the memories.

# ? Aug 13, 2015 14:22

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

For those of you who like the Doc Eldar stories, I'm going to start working on my next one. However, there's something else that I can offer, if you want. I've written a story that I haven't shared yet, and the reason is that it's chronologically the final story (it was written fourth). I'm going to keep writing regardless, but if you want to read the ending now, I will be happy to post it.

Unlike the other stories, which just have numbers, this one has its own title, which is "Last Night On Call."

# ? Aug 15, 2015 18:00

TheArmorOfContempt: Nov 29, 2012; Did I ever tell you my favorite color was blue?

berzerkmonkey posted:

Maybe? It's been a while since I read it, and if that was the explanation, it certainly didn't register with me. That does sound like a very Eldar-thing to do.

I think that is the general idea, but it isn't merely a "kill all the good humans" but more that if King had lived it would of set in motion a chain of events that would've had negative consequences for the Cabal millennia down the road.

# ? Aug 16, 2015 14:47

Arquinsiel: Jun 1, 2006; "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first."

God Bless Margaret Thatcher
God Bless England
RIP My Iron Lady

Kylaer posted:

For those of you who like the Doc Eldar stories, I'm going to start working on my next one. However, there's something else that I can offer, if you want. I've written a story that I haven't shared yet, and the reason is that it's chronologically the final story (it was written fourth). I'm going to keep writing regardless, but if you want to read the ending now, I will be happy to post it.

Unlike the other stories, which just have numbers, this one has its own title, which is "Last Night On Call."

To be fair, I kind of see this as the narrator offloading to some poor kid who just wanted a night out but got grabbed by the old SpaceCoot at some bar in downtown Vervunhive twenty years on from him quitting the fleet or whatever. Go right ahead, dodgy timeframes makes sense for a drunk old guy.

# ? Aug 17, 2015 01:38

Deptfordx: Dec 23, 2013

I wonder how the new Age of Sigmar Novels and audiobooks are selling?

Having read that first Gates of Azyr, I personally have zero interest in reading further.

# ? Aug 17, 2015 14:41

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Arquinsiel posted:

To be fair, I kind of see this as the narrator offloading to some poor kid who just wanted a night out but got grabbed by the old SpaceCoot at some bar in downtown Vervunhive twenty years on from him quitting the fleet or whatever. Go right ahead, dodgy timeframes makes sense for a drunk old guy.

Alright, here it is. Let's see how it matches up with your expectations. It's too long to fit in one post, so it'll be split.

quote:

Let me tell you a little story about the most terrifying boss I've ever had. It's not a story I enjoy telling. The boss I'm referring to was an alien, a hireling of the Monsignor Jeremias, who was no particularly stable individual himself, even for a rogue trader. What motivated the Monsignor to offer the xeno a contract, I have not the slightest clue, other than that he needed a trauma surgeon...and the alien was, with total honesty, the most skillful surgeon I'd ever seen. At the same time, he was perhaps the worst doctor, due to a stunning disregard for the suffering experienced by his patients. His idea of an anesthetic was telling the patient to hold still. It was a testament to his skill level that this was usually enough to let him accomplish his work...and when it wasn't, he would inject paralytic. The alien had a name, but I never learned to pronounce it properly. I called him Doc Eldar.

You've heard of the Monsignor Jeremias, I'm sure - after the incident that ended his career, I'd be shocked if you hadn't. There are official reports, too, all available now that you've got clearance. Doc Eldar was there when it all came to an end, although his part in the story was never written down, never recorded in any way. But I remember, the details clear in my mind as if it happened an hour ago. Our last night on call.

We'd received an alert from the bridge, telling all medic-response and trauma teams to be standing ready for possible casualty treatment. Having recently made transition to realspace, just after starting the long burn that would take us in-system, the ship had received a distress call from a vessel outside the Oort cloud and, the Monsignor having been caught in a favorable mood, was responding.

"Perhaps we will be treating injured from the other ship," Doc Eldar said, as he prepared a third trauma roll, in excess of the two he normally carried. The thin roll of canvas was punctuated with straps and slots, and he fitted them with his essential tools - a handful of vessel clamps, probes, and a few syringes of chosen medications. Packing up an extra trauma roll meant he was expecting significant casualties.

"Or, perhaps, from our own ship," I replied. I had already checked and re-checked the scene box, the carrying of which was my principle responsibility in mobile responses. It carried all the other equipment that might be needed in an emergency, but which the xeno didn't care to burden himself with.

"I predict Jeremias will not initiate an attack this time," Doc Eldar replied, with his head cocked at a pensive angle. "He did that for the last distress call. He dislikes repeating himself."

"The other ship might initiate," I offered. "Jeremias isn't the only shipmaster willing to dabble in piracy. The distress call could be just a lure."

"That could be...interesting."

And how right he was, in such a horrible way.

The deckplates started a steady, barely-perceptible quiver as the ship burned engines to match vectors with the distressed vessel. Our trauma suite was part of the ship's main hospital facility, near the aft end and close enough that engine vibration was still easily picked up, even by my human-average senses. Doc Eldar could probably have told me exactly how fast the ship was decelerating, but I didn't particularly care. One way or another, things were about to get busy.

The hum of the engines was interrupted by a sudden twitch of movement, running counter to our line of travel. As I looked at the xeno, waiting for an interpretation, it happened again, this time more forcefully. A suspicion dawned in my mind.

"Ship-grade weapons impacts," the alien confirmed. "Possibly kinetic batteries...possibly plasma fire. The void shields have now been raised."

"They're attacking us." It was not a particularly insightful comment, but at the time it seemed important to say. "Someone thinks they can take Jeremias. Take us all."

Instinct told me to go pelting down the hallway, looking for wounded and jumping in to start treating them. But reason told me to wait, to trust that the triage coordinator would assign us to the most appropriate task as soon as it presented itself. If casuality-evacuation protocols held up, we might never leave the trauma suite, since we'd certainly be able to do more with a stream of patients being brought here than we would running from site to site. It hadn't yet dawned on me the scale of the event that was occurring.

Doc Eldar, for his part, just stood, entirely still except for his head. That twitched back and forth, long ears aligning to pick up sounds I couldn't catch.

A chime sounded on the public-address vox - a six-note fanfare that warned of an impending announcement by the Monsignor himself. Anyone with access to a pict-caster screen would be expected to watch as well as listen, and we had one in the surgical suite. Seconds later, an image of Jeremias swam into view on the blurry projector.

"Hear ye, hear ye," he began. "As some of you may have realized, we are currently engaged in a battle against a ship that treacherously ambushed us from the position of making a distress call. As some of you won't be able to realize, due to being dead, they gave us a sucker punch, but now our shields are up and we're hitting back. My condolences to the deceased, and you will be avenged."

The red tell-tale light over the trauma suite's main door began flashing. Casualties inbound, from one of the ship's emergency-response medic teams.

The Monsignor had been involved in ship-to-ship battles in the past, of course, Some of them had been attempts at piracy directed against our vessel, but Jeremias was an improbably successful trader, and was confined by the structure of his warrant to owning a single ship. Thus, the ship he helmed was a jewel of Mechanicus craftsmanship, every system finely tuned and optimized. More than one attempted attack had been warded off simply by running out the macro-cannons and showing just how many of them the ship had. For the rare fools who had persisted beyond the opening engagement, it had always ended with the Monsignor's ship all but untouched, and the carcass of the other vessel ready to be picked over for reclaimed loot. On a few occasions, the Monsignor had been sufficiently bored to commit piratical acts of his own, usually in the wildest regions of the subsector's edge. These tended to be even more one-sided than the defensive fights, although they had always ended with surrender and subsequent ransom rather than outright destruction.

Today's fight was different. There would be no easy conclusion. A shiver in the air denoted the firing of a broadside - a sensation to be repeated many times over the next few hours.

"We stay here," the xeno said. "No scene responses." I nodded in response.

A minute or two later, we had our first arrival. It wasn't one patient. It was four patients, crammed onto two gurneys, ushered by a frantic team of three emergency responders.

"All blast and shrapnel injuries from the edge of one of the impact zones," the lead medic shouted as she crossed into the suite, "this one has arterial bleeding from the brachial, tourniquet is in place." She stared at Doc Eldar, eyes wide. "Doctor, there are more coming. A lot more."

The xeno nodded, no expression on his face. "Triage and mass-casualty protocols are active." He turned to me. "Move the surgical table and our equipment out into the holding area." His eyes flicked back to the patients. "Low priority. Low priority. Medium priority" - that in reference to a middle-aged man with a blood-soaked pressure dressing wrapped about his midsection - "and...low priority." In the pause in his speech, he'd slit the tourniquet wrapped around the arm of the young man with the severed artery, stuck a vessel clamp into the ragged gash just below it, and fastened it tight. He hadn't been able to see into the wound, but that didn't matter. I knew that the bleeding would be controlled.

Mass-casualty protocols meant that the incoming casualties were too great in number to handle in the trauma suite. The suite had its main door that opened into one of the main longitudinal concourses of the ship, but a side door that led down another short hallway would take you to the principle operating area; there were thirty regular operating rooms, arranged around an open pre-operative holding area, and the post-operative recovery area was down another hallway. Equipment storage was located on the floors immediately above and below, with each pair of rooms having a dedicated lift-shaft to bring them their gear. It was an efficient layout for all of the routine surgeries that were performed in the day-to-day life of a ship with tens of thousands of crew. I could only hope that it would be an equally efficient layout for all of the far-from-routine surgeries that were about to take place.

According to the infrequent drills, one physician would be tasked to stay in the holding area and triage the incoming patients, while every other available surgeon would be in an operating room. The holding and recovery areas would be used as staging grounds for the patients who were waiting for surgery, and if those overflowed, there were several more large gathering halls around the hospital perimeter, tasked for that purpose. There was no mention in the plan of a surgical table in the triage area. But the xeno had other thoughts. I loaded as much surgical gear onto the table as I could, then pushed it carefully down the hallway. Doc Eldar had strode ahead of me, joining the gathering crowd of medical staff assembling in the room.

"The ship took two major impacts before the shields were raised," the xeno said, without preamble. The others - surgeons, surgical nurses, and assistants alike - were silent as he spoke. In his pale robes with their faint silver traceries, he stood apart from the blue- and green-clad mass. They all knew him; none had worked with him like I had, but none would question his skill, or doubt his judgment. "Casualties could number into the hundreds from those strikes alone. I will handle many of them myself," his eyes taking on the light of anticipation as he said this, "but everyone here will be busy. I will perform triage as well as operating. Now, assignments." He sped through the crowd, matching up surgeons with operating rooms and filling in ancillary staff. Only eighteen of the thirty regular rooms had surgeons available, and the trauma suite itself was being staffed by Doctor Jayamar, who was the surgeon closest to Doc Eldar in seniority; she and her team immediately went to work on the patient who had been brought in with the abdominal wound in the first wave.

One physician did not enter a room. His name was Doctor Sawettan, and although Doctor Bisko had had great respect for him, he was a man for whom Doc Eldar had no use under normal circumstances - he was the chief anesthesiologist for the hospital, and the xeno had a spiteful disdain for anesthesia of any sort. But when Sawettan explained that he could use his full dozen spare seernas to keep patients alive until surgeons were available to fix them, the xeno nodded. "Yes. I will take this into account in my triage decisions. You are data-linked to your servitors, correct?"

Doctor Sawettan nodded. He was a big man, both tall and obese, with most of his hair going grey. He had bulbous augmetics fused to the skin behind his ears, and haptic filigrees running down each of his fingers. "Constant stream, from every one."

"Stay close. I will need your information." Hearing that surprised me. I suppose it shouldn't have - Doc Eldar had never shown a tendency to let anything personal get in the way of providing treatment.

A few patients had been trickling in as all of this had been occurring. Most of them were, by current standards, minor injuries - Doc Eldar sent these away to wait in the gathering halls, not wanting an operating room to be occupied by something minor when a desperate case arrived. More serious injuries - a collapsed lung from a spar of shrapnel, a leg that had been nearly amputated just below the knee, third-degree burns across a man's arms, chest, and throat - were shunted into operating rooms. The xeno kept the table in front of him open, awaiting its first case - it was the only time I had ever seen him not dive in with all haste to get his own hands into someone else's body.

The flow of patients grew from a trickle to a flood. It wasn't just emergency-response teams that were bringing them - a few came in as walking wounded, others were assisted by any means available. People were being carried through the door in cargo nets, slid on mattresses, or just dragged bodily. Doc Eldar picked his first patient from this latter group, a young man who surely wasn't out of his teens yet, who had a head wound that didn't appear to be severe - the scalp had bled, of course, but that would have been easy to control.

"Look at his left eye," the xeno pointed out to me. "The pupil is barely three millimeters in diameter. The right is almost five. He is bleeding inside his skull."

The young man didn't struggle as we hauled him up onto the table. That, more than anything, was a clue of just how severe his injury was; anybody who understood what was going on would have been terrified as we strapped his head immobile. The xeno opened his scalp with a S-curve incision, exposed the bone, and cut through it. With his knife. I never saw him use any cutting instrument other than that knife, regardless of circumstance. Its blade bit through bone almost as easily as it did skin and flesh, and a few circular passes allowed the removal of a plug of skull several centimeters across. Just as the xeno had predicted, there was a large quantity of blood, which he evacuated with a suction rod, before placing a drain and tacking a wire mesh panel into place over the hole. Closing the skin took less than a minute more, and all in all he had accomplished the surgery in about the same time a typical neurosurgeon would take just to expose the skull bone properly.

But in those few minutes, another nine badly injured men and women had arrived.

The xeno dealt with all of them, sending some to the remaining available operating rooms, others to be maintained by Doctor Sawettan's seernas, and taking one onto his own table, as a technician wheeled the first young man away on a gurney. Another surgeon arrived, an orthopedist who was immediately tasked to work on a woman with a shattered pelvis who was hemorrhaging internally. The tipping point had been reached, I could see - another few critical patients, and there would simply be no-one available to take care of them.

Another gurney rolled in, escorted by a pair of wild-eyed medics. "Minor burns, major shrapnel to the throat and chest, right lung is collapsed," called the senior medic.

Doc Eldar looked at me and gave me a glimpse of his nightmarish predatory teeth, in what I'm sure he meant to be a smile. "The days you encounter a challenge are the days most worth living," he said. Then he turned back to the medics, standing side-on to our operating table. "Bring your gurney here," he directed, gesturing at his other side. I realized what he was about to do before the medics did - they found themselves serving as impromptu scrub technicians, as the xeno began operating on the new victim with his right hand, while continuing his operation on our other patient with his left.

He split his attention between two completely different surgeries and still managed to perform triage as he did it. A string of minor injuries were sent away, and as operating rooms finished, he directed the worse-injured victims to the surgery teams best suited for handling their injuries. There was a cardiac surgeon in room four and another in room seven, handling lung and thoracic injuries, vascular surgeons and orthopedists working on traumatic amputations - even the obstetric surgeons were put to the task, treating abdominal injuries. They were not trauma specialists, but in this time of need, they got the job done.

Even though he was operating with one hand, I was hard-matched to keep up with him. On a string of patients, he clamped or tied off bleeding vessels, inserted intrathoracic decompression tubes for collapsed lungs, slit open throats to insert breathing tubes, and more. This was damage-control surgery, meant to prevent death - there was no question of trying to reattach severed limbs or perform cosmetic closures. My long history of working with him was paying off, though - despite how slow I felt, I was doing a better job of providing the tools and assistance he needed than the two surgical technicians on the far side, who had replaced the utterly-out-of-their-depth medics. Patient after patient was shuttled out to the recovery area, and I felt reasonably confident that they all were going to make it. That wasn't true for all of the operating rooms; Doctor Sawettan was steadily relaying updates to Doc Eldar from each of his seernas, and there were a few deaths being reported. But for the scale of the disaster we were facing, it seemed like our results were remarkable. We were fighting against a tide, and some were being swept away, but for the moment, by and large, we were holding. This was not to last. The battle had been going on for barely more than an hour.

The xeno had finished work on two patients at essentially the same time, and had immediately taken on two more. Just moments after this, another rolled through the door, this one burned so badly that I couldn't tell whether it had been a man or woman. I thought maybe it was someone who was already dead - several corpses had mistakenly been brought in so far, mostly dead from closed head injuries. But no - there were twitches of motion in the withered limbs. The victim lived, against all likelihood.

Doc Eldar stared at the hideous burns for a full three seconds - an eternity, with the speed his mind operated. Then he spat a word as if it tasted vile: "Palliative."

I didn't understand what he meant. I'd never heard him use the word before. He had to explain: "Take him away, give him painkillers, and let him die. There is not enough time to help him."

With those words, the mood changed. On an instinctive level, I believed that Doc Eldar didn't lose patients. Doc Eldar didn't let patients die. In my mind, that was how it worked - if you were injured, and you made it to the xeno's presence, you would be saved. It might cost you the worst pain you ever experienced, and for a time you might wish that you had instead died, but you would make it. That first palliative declaration marked the moment I began to realize just how bad the situation was. Not even the xeno, with his preternatural skills, could save everyone. And right behind the realization that Doc Eldar was fallible came the realization that the Monsignor, too, must be fallible - what if all our efforts here in the hospital were meaningless? What if Jeremias lost? What if the ship was shelled to an airless wreck, and all of us died?

The next few hours are a blur in my memory. I was terrified, and the work just kept getting worse. We didn't get walking wounded any more - anyone who was still able-bodied enough to move was needed at their duty station. The shields were failing, I gathered, and the hull was intermittently taking fresh hits, each creating a new wave of victims. The patients who were brought into the hospital were an unending stream of horrors. Burns - from flame, steam, electrical arcs and caustic chemicals. Shrapnel. Void exposure. Blunt force trauma. Those are what filled my eyes and my mind. I worked because there was nothing else to do. And the declaration of palliative care became more and more common, as we fell further behind, unable to handle the number of casualties.

Doctor Sawettan stayed close at hand. He didn't look at the surgeries being performed in front of him - his eyes were unfocused, as if he was listening to something only he could hear. Which, in fact, he was - I'd had a chance to talk to him about his work, back in the days before Doctor Bisko left the ship, and he had told me that he heard the data streams from his seernas as music, and the twitching of his hands relayed commands to them like a conductor to an orchestra. His forehead was sheened with perspiration - I could only imagine that he was hearing a cacophany of discordant notes, with thirty major trauma victims under his care.

"Jayamar's got her patient stabilized, closing now, finished in five to seven minutes," he reported. "Deiq's losing his eleven - he got the spleen out so that's controlled, but there's intracranial bleeding that I didn't notice in time, brainstem herniation will occur before either of our neurosurgeons are free to assist."

"What is the status of the patient in room six?" Doc Eldar said, tying off a stitch with each hand.

"Pressure's falling despite massive transfusion and pressors. I think it's an iliac artery laceration from the shrapnel. Estimate four to five minutes before point of no return." A drop ran down the anesthesiologist's face, hung at the end of his nose for a moment, then fell, unnoticed.

"Palliate the patient in eleven. Send Deiq and his team to six. Is Doctor Adonly making progress?" That was one of our neurosurgeons, who had been working for several minutes without a report, on a young victim who'd been thrown from a catwalk by an impact and landed on her head.

"Adonly just called for a tech-priest. Too much neural damage, they'll puppet-spike the body and send it back to work. He'll be available for a new patient within ten minutes." I winced at that. Turning brain-damaged but whole-bodied victims into short-lived servitors made sense in an emergency like this, you could usually get an hour or two of function out of them - but it was an act of utmost desperation, one I'd heard of as a theory, but never seen practiced before today.

You've seen people die, I know enough about your history to know that. I'd seen people die, too; I'd been a surgical orderly for quite some time by this point. But it's never easy, I'm sure you'll agree.

When the Monsignor's fanfare went off again, I barely recognized it. It was only when he started speaking, in his usual boisterous tone, that I thought to look around towards the pict-screen.

"My brave and loyal crew," Jeremias began, "today has been the blackest day in all my time as captain of this grand vessel. Today has seen great suffering and death. But behold! There is now a gleam of light!" His image was replaced by a view from one of the external telescopes, as he often did when on close approach to whatever world was our destination. This time, rather than showing the bright sphere of a planet, it showed another ship, one with lean, harsh lines - a military vessel, smaller than our own ship, but clearly built with violence in mind. And violence in plenty had been visited upon the ship - great gouges and tears marred its armor, and it was surrounded by a faint cloud of debris and vented atmosphere. The view wobbled, then zoomed in closer, to show where blue-white plasma fire was boiling from a particularly deep crater, well back along the ship's flank.

"They lured us in by pretending to be in distress! They struck us a treacherous blow! They have killed your fellows by the thousand! But they did one more thing." The Monsignor's voice rose to a triumphant crow. "They put their main reactor in front of our spinal lance battery! And now they're *dead!*" He paused, and the pict-screen returned to showing him, seated on his command throne. "Well, mostly dead, at least. They launched a few pods and we may not be able to shoot them all down. Gendarme teams, stand ready to repel boarders. And if you see their captain, there's money on his head, or any other irreplaceable body part. Big money. He tried to taunt me earlier. This is what he looks like."

There was another cut on the screen, and this time the Monsignor was replaced with a close-up image of a face - a man's face, I was sure, although there were odd things about it, proportions that struck me as wrong. He was heavily tattooed, and braided wires twisted across his forehead, tunneling into the skin beneath his hairline. The image was a still, apparently caught in mid-roar.

Doc Eldar stared at the image with a focus I'd previously seen directed only at the critically wounded. He murmured something that I could barely hear - I thought part of it was "child," but that made no sense. His hands kept moving, performing his dual surgeries, even with his gaze locked on the screen. He looked away when the Monsignor's image returned to wish everyone good hunting, and after another fanfare, Jeremias was gone.

When he finished his right-hand surgery, stopping the bleeding from a deep pelvic artery and grafting in a bypass conduit so that the man wouldn't subsequently lose the leg from lack of blood supply, he didn't take on another patient. Wordlessly, he turned and focused with both hands on my patient, a woman who had sustained flash-burns to her upper chest, neck, and face. He had already performed a tracheotomy and skinned away most of the burn eschar, and all that remained was to tack some temporary synth-skin in place, which would protect the wound bed until there was time for a proper graft. This took less time for him to perform than it does for me to describe it. Again, as an assistant rolled the patient away, he refused to take another.

"Triage," he said, in response to my questioning stare. "There is something I can do that will save even more lives than my work here. Go and tell Doctor Jayamar that she is in charge now."

He turned and sped away, towards his call room. The role of chief of surgery came with a fine suite of rooms in officers' country; Doctor Bisko had often hosted dinner gatherings for members of the surgery department, so I'd seen them several times. To the best of my knowledge, Doc Eldar had never entered his suite. He lived in the little call room off the hallway between the trauma suite and the main operating area. Now he vanished through its door, leaving me puzzled.

By the time I had told Doctor Jayamar of her new role, Doc Eldar was back in the corridor. His robes were gone. In their place, he wore a suit of armored plates, bone-pale and trimmed in deepest purple. The suit was sinuous, articulated so that it seemed to impede his movement not at all. His ever-present knife was strapped to the back of his left forearm, and it was not the only weapon he carried - there was a pistol with a slender, fluted barrel secured to one hip, and a sword on the other, which looked like a stretched version of his knife, single-edged and needle-pointed. He had a helmet in his hands.

"The Monsignor does not understand what he is facing," the xeno said. "His ignorance will see him slain, and everyone on the ship afterwards, when that being has access to the bridge controls. I will prevent it."

I don't know what came over me. I'm not a fighter, of any sort. But if the xeno said something had to be done, I trusted him, and so I spoke up. "Can I help?"

He stared at me for a moment, then gave a fractional nod. "Yes. You will need a weapon." He opened the call room door once again, and from inside - it must have been leaning up against the door frame - he produced a rifle. It couldn't have been anything other than a rifle, despite not looking like any weapon I had seen before. The barrel was long, almost spindly, and fluted with ridges like those on his pistol. The grip and stock were smoothly contoured, showing an artistry in their construction that common weapons lacked. But there was nothing artistic about the bayonet blade fixed beneath the muzzle - it was a simple, cruel sliver of metal, a double-edged copy of the xeno's knife. He handed me the weapon, and I took it carefully.

"Be aware," the xeno said, "the projectiles are coated with a poison that is lethal to human biology. The poison would not affect me, but the projectiles themselves could still injure or kill. Aim carefully. The trigger is here." The rifle didn't fit me well, but I would make do. "Now, we must move."

The hospital was located near the lift-trunk that led up into the bridge tower, the better to receive wounded from that most vital region. The xeno outpaced me effortlessly, and I caught up to him as he waited in an open lift cube. I knew he had an override token, and I assumed that was the only way he'd obtained a lift so quickly. We entered, and he tapped the icon for the command deck.

"What did you mean, being?" I asked.

"What you saw in the Monsignor's broadcast was not a human," the xeno replied. "It is one of your emperor's creations. An Astartes. A fallen son. An Emperor's Child."

I had no idea what the words meant. Surely a son of the God-Emperor would not be attacking us in such a way. And if the Monsignor had crossed such a line that the military might of the Imperium was set against him...surely he wouldn't be winning the battle.

"Not the first such being I have killed," he said, voice taking on a musing tone. "I remember the civil war your species fought. It was not long after disaster had struck my own kind, and we were scattered and weak. But some of us took to the battlefield - not enough to change the war's course, but for spite against the servants of the Great Enemy. And of all the blood we shed, that the Emperor's Children was the sweetest." He gave another of his horrific smiles. "It will be good to taste it once more."

I honestly had nothing to say in response to that. The lift cube was creaking as it crawled upward - I'm sure the shaft had taken some damage. I just gripped the curiously-shaped rifle and waited. The xeno, apparently having said all he wanted to say, settled his helmet down over his head.

Doc Eldar killed a man a quarter-second after the doors opened. He was standing just outside the doors, carrying a wide-mouthed shotgun, and even though the gun was raised and aimed towards the lift, he wasn't fast enough to fire before Doc Eldar had drawn his pistol and put a shot through his right eye. The alien pistol made a dry, quiet sound, like someone snapping their fingers. The man dropped like a puppet, falling bonelessly to the floor. He didn't scream, or thrash around, or show any signs at all. He just fell. I stared at him for a couple of seconds - he was an older man, his face tattooed and scarred, dressed in a mixture of body armor and flowing silk. He'd probably been left behind to guard against someone doing exactly what we did, but he'd been too slow. And now he was dead, face slack, remaining eye open and staring at nothing.

"Follow," the xeno ordered. I'd never been to the bridge, but he moved with certainty down the hallway, and so I followed. There were bodies on the floor ahead of us - mostly gendarmes in the Monsignor's livery, but a few others as well, showing no uniformity in their dress at all. One was heavily armored, another practically naked, a third swathed in voluminous robes and a cloak, which now puddled around him on the floor, soaking up his life's blood. He'd been killed by at least one shotgun blast to the chest, and his death had been messy.

But not as messy as those of some of the gendarmes. I saw two that had been hit by what I could only guess was some kind of explosive projectile - they had burst from the inside, ribcages and tissue splaying away from the hideous wounds. Other gendarmes had died from huge slashing wounds, blows that had split skulls, severed limbs, and in one case had actually cut a man in half. I'd seen all kinds of trauma, in my time as an orderly, and that was what let me keep my stomach steady - but even for me, this was butchery of a sort I'd never considered possible. The battle wounds we had been treating in the recent hours had been grievous, but they had been inflicted from far away; this had been up close and very, very personal.

I heard a burst of gunfire just ahead, and Doc Eldar gestured for me to halt. I could hear both the high-pitched crack of las weaponry and the duller booms of projectile firearms, resounding appallingly loud in the corridors. "A gendarme team against the tail of the invaders' force," he said, head cocked as he listened. "The gendarmes are losing...and now they have lost," he concluded, as the guns fell silent. A couple of isolated shots followed, and I had no difficulty imagining their purpose.

"They chased the gendarmes down that side corridor. We will hit them as they return. Be ready." Doc Eldar flattened himself against the wall near the corridor junction, pistol in one hand, sword in the other. I followed his example, careful to keep the muzzle of the rifle pointed at the deck.

I had thought that the xeno would wait until the invaders had rounded the corner, but this was not his plan. Instead, as I heard their footsteps draw close, he turned in place, right arm snaking around the corner, with his head leaned just close enough to the edge that he'd be able to see with one eye. His pistol snapped, too rapidly for me to count individual shots. I heard the dull thumps of falling bodies, and the clatter of armor and weapons hitting the deck. No screams. It had been over too quickly for that.

He slid around the corner, and I followed. Seven bodies, tumbled limp between two and ten meters away. Their deaths had been quieter than just about every surgery that I'd ever seen the xeno perform. "What kind of poison is this?" I asked.

Doc Eldar angled his helmeted head down slightly as he looked back at me. "Surgical paralytic."

I blinked. Their deaths had not, in fact, been peaceful. In fact, it was likely that, having only been shot a few seconds ago, they weren't actually dead yet. With no muscle function, all of them would die of suffocation soon, but it would not be a peaceful way to go, despite how it looked from the outside.

The blast doors leading to the bridge were only a bit further down the hall. They had come under a heavy assault, and had failed - cut edges of metal were still glowing as we approached. I could hear fighting within, and screams.

"Good hunting," the xeno said, and he blurred through the ruptured door. In that moment, with the alien rifle clutched in my trembling hands, I wasn't sure if I could follow. I wasn't a soldier. I'd never gone into danger like this before.

I crept to the door, and peered in.

The bridge was a cavernous space, with a vaulted ceiling supported by ornate structural ribs. The control stations were arrayed in banks that rose along the walls and sunk into the floor, with an arching platform at the rear of the hall for the Monsignor and his personal advisors - I recognized his throne from his broadcasts.

I didn't have time to take a full account of the violence swirling through the room, because one of the invaders noticed me and raised an ugly, short-barreled lasgun. I ducked back, and a brilliant ray of energy lit the air, close enough to leave a bloom of heat on my face.

The xeno was in there, fighting against what were likely long odds. Part of me was screaming that he could handle himself, that I should turn and get out of here...but I had offered to help. I couldn't turn back now. I thought, for a moment, what would Doc Eldar do? And then I acted.

I didn't come around the door at standing level. I crouched as low to the floor as I possibly could, hugging the metal. I held the rifle vertical - it was very light, easy to maneuver. Without taking time to second-guess myself, I slid around the edge, rifle dropping into a firing position.

The man who had taken a shot at me was heading for the door, as I had expected. His gun was ready, and he pulled the trigger faster than I did - but he pulled it faster than he could aim, and his shot scattered sparks from the metal of the door a few centimeters away from my face.

I was not a killer. I'd been in the usual scuffles as a child, a few fistfights as an adult. The worst injury I'd ever dealt someone had been a broken cheekbone and jaw, delivered with a barstool to a man who had become dangerously drunk. But I sighted the xeno rifle at the man's chest and fired. It wasn't an accurate shot - I saw the man's loose shirt get suddenly tugged, against his right shoulder, and an instant later blood began to wet the fabric. Yet the poison meant accuracy was of little importance. He tried to sight his gun on me, but his arm went limp, then his knees followed, and he toppled to the deck.

With the immediate threat gone, I had a chance to look around. I had killed a man. Meanwhile, Doc Eldar had killed at least a dozen - as I watched, he flicked his sword clean and turned to face the Monsignor's platform.

There was a...thing...standing on the platform. I recognized its face from the Monsignor's broadcast, when I had thought it was a man, but it was not human. It would be easier to mistake Doc Eldar for human than this.

# ? Aug 17, 2015 16:44

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Second part:

quote:

The figure was tall - not tall on the typical human scale, as the xeno was, but head and shoulders above this. Its frame was enormous, three or four times as bulky as a normal man, encased in armor that enlarged it even further. The armor was hideous, with barbs and spikes lining its edges, painted in a mixture of garish colors where it wasn't splattered with blood. In the center of its chest plate, a golden aquila shone, the one thing of recognizable beauty about the figure - made all the worse by the horror surrounding it.

In one hand, the terrible giant carried a sword, a double-edged weapon whose crosspiece would have been level with my shoulder with the tip grounded on the deck. Sullen sparks of electricity crawled along the blade, crackling loud enough for me to hear, even from my distance.

In the other, it held the head of the Monsignor Jeremias.

Doc Eldar stood among a swath of fallen bodies, and although it was hard for me to tear my eyes away, I did glance around to see if any of the human invaders were still standing. I saw none of them, only the remainder of the bridge crew, scrambling frantically towards the emergency exits. It was down to the xeno and the monster.

The armored giant smiled as it spoke, showing a set of massive teeth as white and perfect as those of an anatomical model. "One of the forsaken race. And of the fallen kin, at that. Even more pathetic than the rest of your kind. You were offered glory by the almighty Slaanesh, and instead you chose to cower and die."

"You are an original," the xeno replied, "not one of the later-crafted of your legion. Do you remember a ship, a fast raider that flew under the name Sixfold Glories?"

"Presumed lost in action at the Battle of Terra," the giant replied.

Doc Eldar gave a slight shake of his head. "The ship never made it to Terra. It had twelve Emperor's Children Astartes on board when it started its flight, slightly over five thousand human thralls...and me. I left that ship a charnel house. If you searched the vector between Rigel and Terra thoroughly enough, I expect it drifts there still."

The giant's expression hadn't wavered. "So you were a hunter once. And what are you now?"

"Unchanged."

The snapping reports of the xeno's pistol merged into a single ripping sound. I hadn't seen him raise his hand, and at the same time he streaked forward, up the steps to the command platform. The armored giant twisted and ducked his exposed face behind one of his outsized shoulder pauldrons, sword blurring into a guard position. I think Doc Eldar threw his sword, as he closed the final few meters; it was all happening too fast for me to pick out details. But I saw the xeno launch himself into a roll, barely clearing the top step as he flew under the giant's swinging blade. I saw him ricochet upwards as the giant tried to turn towards him. And I saw him clinging to the giant's armored back, left arm latched onto the rim of the giant's pauldron, right arm snaking in front of the giant's face. His knife was in his hand. His knife was in the giant's eye.

Even as I saw this, I heard the booming of a gun's report, and my eyes tracked down. As Doc Eldar had made his strike, the giant had drawn an enormous pistol, twisted back to press it against the xeno's hip, and fired.

Slowly, like the beginning of an avalanche, the giant fell, face-first to the platform's surface. Doc Eldar rode down with the fall, still gripping the hilt of his knife.

I dropped the rifle and ran, pounding up the steps as fast as I could. The giant was motionless, but Doc Eldar was moving, twisting slowly to roll off his fallen adversary. I reached him just as he slid to sit on the platform, back braced against the giant's flank.

His pale armor was shattered, burst from within by the explosive round. It had struck at a shallow angle, I saw, so rather than tearing him in half at the waist, it had only left a huge, gaping wound across his hip and pelvis - or what would have been a pelvis on a human, I wasn't sure if his bone structure was comparable. Regardless, the wound was terrible to look upon. I found myself praying to the God-Emperor that the xeno's physiology was more resilient than my own, that he might survive his wound. I'm pretty sure that was heresy, looking back.

Doc Eldar slowly, carefully unrolled one of his trauma rolls from a belt pouch, and began pulling out vessel clamps. I slid to my knees beside him. "Let me help you!"

His helmet turned towards me. "That may be impossible. It is a severe wound." He began probing, clamping off some of the most prominent bleeding vessels, but his customary speed was nowhere to be seen. "Bring me my knife."

I obeyed, scrambling around the fallen giant to pull the knife from its eye. The blade was stuck hard in the bone of the eye socket, and I had to wrench it free. I handed it over to him. "You can't die," I said, hearing the frantic edge in my voice. "We need you. The ship needs you."

The xeno clamped another vessel, then reached up, unfastening his helmet and letting it drop to the floor beside him. "Of all the things that could be said to me in my last moments...that is one I would have never heard, save in this situation." He stared at me, as his hands returned to their careful work. "You cannot help me now. Go, and begin triage of the bridge crew. Return to me in five minutes. At that point, I will either be able to use your help, or be beyond it." He paused, then lifted his knife up to his face, edge facing the ceiling. He ran his tongue down the spine of the blade, licking off the runnels of blood that had settled there. "Just as it was," he said, a note of satisfaction in his voice.

I turned away. A horrible weight had settled into my guts, as I left the xeno to his work, but I obeyed. I circled the lower tier of the bridge stations, checking bodies - I found a few who were wounded badly enough to be immobile, but still potentially salvageable. Not many. Most of those I checked were simply corpses.

After the five minutes the xeno had demanded had passed, I returned to the platform. I knew as soon as I laid eyes on the scene that I was too late. Doc Eldar was slumped against his fallen foe, head resting against a ridge on the giant's backpack. His eyes were closed. I crept close and knelt, afraid to speak, but knowing that I had to. "Doctor? Are you...?"

He hadn't moved in response, and I couldn't finish the words. I reached out and pressed two fingers against his neck, checking for a pulse. Nothing. Not even a flutter. He was gone.

Doc Eldar had been the cruelest medical provider I had ever met. He had acted with complete disregard for the suffering of his patients. Yet his skills had been unmatched, and he had shown time and again that he truly did care about the outcomes of his work - which were consistently superlative, not even in the same sector as those of any other physician I had worked with or, for that matter, heard of. And now he was dead.

I had to look away, and as I did I noticed that he was holding several things in his blood-covered hands, which rested across his thighs. A syringe, an ovoid thing I didn't recognize, and a square of paper. I seized the paper and stared at what he had written, in between the splotches of deep-purple bloodstains.

"I cannot survive this wound, but you are right. The ship needs me, and I signed the contract of service. The most I can do is to enable you to act in my stead. Take the syringe to my call room, and filter its contents through the alembic you will find there. Then inject yourself. It will give you what you need. The other device is a grenade. Pull the priming strip free, and run away. May fortune favor you."

My hands were shaking, but I obeyed. He hadn't mentioned what to do with his knife, so I took that with me as well - I had no sheath, and had to carry it bare in my hand. I heard an almighty hissing sound as I ran, and a flare of light and heat washed over me, but I did not look back. I found my way back to the lift-trunk. It was nonfunctional, even when I performed the ritual of summoning, so I circled around to the emergency gangway. It was a long way down to the hospital, and I tried not to spend any time thinking on the way. Several decks below the bridge, the lights had failed, leaving only the strips of emergency glow-paint to light my way, but I made it back to the hospital.

I was raised to believe in Hell, you know. A place of suffering and torment, where the souls of those who reject the light of the God-Emperor are doomed to stay for all time. And I do believe in it. I caught a glimpse of what it must be like, on my return to the hospital.

The lights had failed throughout the entire deck, both the primary and the backup circuits. The only illumination came from the dull red tertiary tubes set into the ceiling, which had their own capacitors, and the infrequent cone of a hand-held spotlight. The wounded were crowded around the hospital for hundreds of meters - that's where the injured were supposed to go, and when they got there they were supposed to be treated, be saved. But there were too many, too many by orders of magnitude, too many even to triage. People were dying in the halls, bleeding to death on the floor, or quietly going into respiratory failure from brain trauma. Blood looks black, under red lighting, and black was splattered everywhere, spreading in pools, even slashed against the walls. Some of the wounded were too far gone to scream...but most of them weren't.

I pray that I never see the real Hell. That memory is bad enough for an eternity.

I made it through the press of bodies, if only because most of them were unable to prevent an able-bodied person from stepping over them. Inside the holding area that had become a triage zone, Doctor Jayamar was standing where Doc Eldar had been, trying to juggle a surgery and perform triage simultaneously. Just one surgery, of course. She was skilled, as good as Doctor Bisko had been, but she was only human. She caught me with her eyes as I slid through the door.

"Where's the xeno?" she demanded.

"Dead." I paused for a second. I'd said it, so I couldn't pretend to myself that it hadn't happened. "The Monsignor, too. But Doc Eldar killed the other ship's captain. He broke their attack on the bridge. So the ship should be safe."

Doctor Jayamar was wearing a surgical mask, but I could see around the edges that her mouth was twisted in disappointment. "Alright. We'll carry on without him, then. Can you scrub in? Doctor Risonn in room eight needs a good assistant."

"Of course. Give me just a minute."

"Go ahead. A few minutes will mean little..." She turned back to her dual tasks.

I entered the little call room that had been the xeno's home on the ship. It was only a few meters along each wall, and most of the space was occupied by a bed, which looked untouched, and a work table. The table had clearly seen more use, and had a number of objects scattered on it that I didn't recognize. One I did recognize, thankfully, was a self-powered lamp, which gave me a pool of yellow light amidst the red. And I recognized the alembic, a standard piece of medical glassware, with its chambers and heating element. There was something already in one of the lower chambers, a fine powder, and a clear liquid just above the heating element. I took out the syringe, gave it a shake, and squirted it in with the powder. A flick of a switch turned the heating element on, and I stared and waited as it began to boil.

The liquid from the syringe was black, I thought at first, but as the clear liquid boiled up into the upper chamber, I saw that it was actually a deep purple. It looked like the stains that had marked the xeno's message. Doc Eldar's blood.

The mixture dissolved the powder, then siphoned into a collection beaker. I looked at the syringe. I didn't know what else was in that concoction, but part of it was alien blood, and the rest was probably not anything from the hospital's formulary either.

But I hadn't trusted the xeno this far to stop now. I drew up the liquid, found a tourniquet and clean needle, and tapped a vein at the bend of my elbow until it was a prominent target. The needle was cold as it slid through my skin - but nowhere as cold as the rush of sensation that followed, after I'd pushed home the injection. It was a good thing I had seated myself on the bed, else I'd have ended up on the floor.

When the room had stopped spinning, I thought at first that the main power had been restored - the gloom was gone, and I could see everything with razor-edged clarity. I sat up, feeling a prickling in my muscles as I moved. I heard Doctor Jayamar calling out triage instructions. I could smell blood, and terrified sweat, and the sharp chemical tangs of disinfectant and wound-sealant.

I stood up. The soles of my shoes were uneven, imperfect. My balance would be better without them, so I kicked them off. I saw them tumble lazily through the air, and knew - knew, not merely guessed - how they would glance off the wall and where they would come to rest. I glanced over at the xeno's knife, lying where I'd left it on the table. The edge was still perfect, despite today's hard use. I would need it.

I didn't know what exactly the xeno's injection was meant to do, but it seemed to be the best stimulant I'd ever heard of.

Doctor Jayamar was working on a new patient as I approached. She didn't look up. I could see the tension in the muscles of her back and shoulders, beneath the surgical gown and scrubs. I could see the minute tremors of her left hand, the one holding the retractor as she cauterized a bleeding vessel. She was giving directions to a medic team as she worked, and I could hear the ragged edge in her voice, and picture the irritation that had begun to set in on her vocal cords.

"Doctor, I can take over triage," I said.

At that, she looked up. She was dark-skinned and sharp-featured, and when her eyes met mine, I saw her pupils dilate in a sudden, adrenaline-fueled twitch. I don't know what she saw in my eyes, but she looked away, and then nodded.

The battle was over, but the aftermath had only begun. It was fifty-one hours after the guns had fallen silent before the first relief vessel arrived. Fifty-one hours of struggling against overwhelming odds, trying to save as many as we could.

In truth, it is a miracle that the ship even held together for those fifty-one hours. Layers of the ship were open to deep space, hemorrhaging atmosphere and heat even as our patients hemorrhaged blood. I credit Belinta Creytion, officer of the second watch and highest-ranking survivor of the ship's command hierarchy, for organizing repair and recovery teams that kept the void out of the ship's remaining habitable regions. I credit the ship's enclave of the Adeptus Mechanicus, who performed brilliantly in restoring the power grid, fixing the atmospheric processors, and keeping conditions inside the ship able to sustain life; when the main lights came on, seventeen hours into the ordeal, there was cheering throughout the hospital, even in the middle of a sea of horrors. I credit all the men and women of the crew whose names I will never know, who sacrificed their lives - who walked unprotected into zones of hard radiation, who stayed in vac-suits until their oxygen supplies were totally exhausted - to do the work that saved the ship, and saved us all.

And I credit Doc Eldar, for giving me the gift he did.

I limited myself to triage for the first two hours. It had taken me several minutes before I realized that we were still relying on the emergency lights - the red gloom seemed to pose no hindrance to my eyes. I could hear heartbeats while standing over someone on a gurney. I could lay my fingers over someone's pulse and not merely count their rate, but discern their blood pressure. All my senses were hyperacute, and time passed slowly, giving me time to pick through each patient's problems while my directions were carried out.

Just past the two-hour mark, I took the xeno's knife in my hand, and went to work. Now I had something to occupy my hands, as I continued my triage work unabated. I was not the equal of the xeno; I never tried to manage two surgeries at once. But the act of operating came to me instinctively, and I found it easy as I treated patient after patient.

All fifty-one hours, I worked. I was the only one who did so. At the twenty-one hour mark, a vascular surgeon named Cohl slipped and laid open his assistant's thumb to the bone with a scalpel, and I realized that measures had to be taken in order to prevent the teams from collapsing of exhaustion. I scheduled breaks - not long, but enough to keep the error rate from becoming dangerous. The only physician who didn't get a break was Doctor Sawettan, who refused to step down, simply because there was no other anesthesiologist and no-one else could handle his seerna orchestra. He worked until he dropped unconscious where he stood - and in the hours that he was out, our fatality rate climbed by sixteen percent, as the seernas fell back on their integral routines. I saw to it that he was not reawakened prematurely; I had no idea when relief would arrive, so he had to be kept healthy.

The only fortunate aspect was that by that time, most of the emergent cases that hadn't been treated had died. We had progressed to salvaging the second wave of injuries - the ones who we had been able to triage earlier, and those who had received enough first aid to hold them together for a day, but who were now at the end of that lifeline. There were still thousands of wounded, many of them desperately so, but the tone had changed from those early hours. Things became more steady, a degree less frantic. The workload remained tremendous, but now things were starting to improve, rather than worsen.

The tone changed again, just after the forty-hour mark, when we ran out of medical supplies. Some things had run dry early; there was no remaining transfusion blood three hours into the aftermath, and the stockpiles of synth-fluid ran out a dozen hours after that. Maintaining the sterility of our instruments fell by the wayside towards the end of the first day - at most, they would get a quick wash in one of the scrub sinks, and at times there wasn't even time for that. Infection would kill someone in days, perhaps, but a liver laceration would kill in minutes. That was one thing. But by forty hours into the aftermath, we'd run out of vessel staples. We'd run out of bone pins. We'd run out of suture. I was closing wounds using thread taken from the clothing fabricators. People started dying again, not because we couldn't spare the staff to treat them, but because we had nothing to treat them with.

Acting-captain Creytion appeared on the pict-screens in the forty-fifth hour. Her message to us was short: help was on the way. And the screen switched to displaying a telescope view once more. On the screen, against the distant stars, a pinprick of light was moving. Over the hours, the light grew, becoming identifiable as the engine flare from a system patrol cutter, burning hot to match our vector. Only a small vessel, compared to ours, but any assistance would be gladly welcomed. And a mere hour behind the cutter flew a frigate from the subsector battlefleet, salvation wrapped in a battlemented shell.

I remember the expression on the face of the first relief physician to reach the hospital. He came through the door, expression alert but calm, and I could see him tallying casualties and setting priorities in his head. Then he saw me, and he stumbled, eyes bugging wide.

"Golden Throne," he gasped, "who are you?" When I didn't immediately reply, he looked at my assistant, pointing a shaking finger in my direction. "Who is she?"

Admittedly, I must have been a sight. Since I had first started operating, my only gaps in activity had been as one patient was hauled away and another maneuvered into place on my table. I hadn't washed. Blood had coated me in layers, particularly my arms, and where it had dried it cracked and flaked away as I moved. As he entered, I had the xeno's knife in my hand, and was extracting a spar of shrapnel from a man's calf - it was a jagged thing, requiring great care to remove it without inflicting even more damage. I had made several small incisions to relieve tension and preserve the blood vessels. I set the knife aside, held the man's leg still with one hand, and carefully drew out the offending piece of metal with the other, tossing it into a waiting trash receptacle. The man shuddered and moaned, but the metal had transfixed his leg for long enough now that the additional pain of removal meant little.

Over the next two hours, the relief physicians carefully interacted with me as little as possible - which was still more than they liked, after Doctor Jayamar informed them that I had been acting as the lead for almost the entirety of the event. I integrated them into the workflow, sending my people off to get some well-deserved rest, and by the time the frigate had docked and those Navy crew were streaming across, I was the last person still working who was from our ship.

At that point, I was asked to step down. Very cautiously, of course, but emphatically nevertheless. My place at the triage station was taken over by a Navy doctor, and I found myself without any clear task to perform, save to wash off the blood - which took a while, I have to say. After that, I wandered into the staff lounge; I wasn't tired, despite all my hours of work, but had no better ideas. Doctor Sawettan was there, passed out on a couch; Doctor Jayamar sat on another, staring into a cup of recaf, and I sat down beside her.

"What happened to you?" she asked, after a few moments of silence. "You're talking like he did. You're moving like he did. What did you do?"

I didn't know how to answer that.

It was there that the detachment of Naval armsmen found me. I was escorted to a nicely-appointed suite onboard the frigate, provided with all manner of comforts - but my presence there was not optional, that was made clear to me. The frigate's captain had no idea of who I was or what should be done, so he deferred the decision to someone more experienced.

He deferred the decision to the one we both serve currently, in fact. I was fortunate - some members of the Inquisition would have killed me on the spot, and the great majority of the rest would have killed me after a full investigation of what had taken place. But I am, have always been, and will always be loyal to the God-Emperor and to humankind, and our leader was open-minded enough to recognize that - and to see what kind of advantages I might bring, through service to the Inquisition, given how I had performed in the emergency.

I kept expecting the xeno's injection to wear off over time. As hours stretched to days, I waited for my perceptions to return to their feeble previous standard, to lose my new coordination and speed. But they have not faded. Some of the traits have grown even more pronounced; my hearing is more keen than it has ever been. I can hear a murmur in your heartbeat. I would need a bio-auspex to see the valve definitively, but I suspect it is mitral in origin. Probably harmless.

In any event, I understand that you received medic training in the Guard before the incident that led to your own recruitment. When needed, you will act as my assistant.

My name? It's not important. You can call me Doc Eldar.

I can share some of the thought process that I went through in writing this, if people are interested, and as always, I love hearing your feedback.

# ? Aug 17, 2015 16:45

berzerkmonkey: Jul 23, 2003

Uroboros posted:

I think that is the general idea, but it isn't merely a "kill all the good humans" but more that if King had lived it would of set in motion a chain of events that would've had negative consequences for the Cabal millennia down the road.

Oh, yeah, I get that - King could have united the country, bringing about an unheard era of peace and prosperity, which could have seen humanity working together to reach the stars at a much earlier than anticipated date. I was just saying that I didn't remember it being explicitly stated as such.

# ? Aug 17, 2015 19:19

Sandweed: Sep 7, 2006; All your friends are me.

A little disappointed the assistant didn't end up as the new Rouge Trader by some DNA reverse engineering.

Sandweed fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Aug 18, 2015

# ? Aug 17, 2015 19:30

Peztopiary: Mar 16, 2009; by exmarx

Kylaer posted:

I can share some of the thought process that I went through in writing this, if people are interested, and as always, I love hearing your feedback.

Amazing. I was on mobile, so it's a pain to go back and check, but was the assistant always a woman? Doesn't matter one way or the other, it was just a nice surprise. I think giving her Eldarlite abilities at the cost of never being able to interact with the regular Imperium again is a good tradeoff, it makes sense that a Radical would get a hold of her if possible. Really though, just a deeply enjoyable story. It's the kind of thing that the Black Library would probably refuse to publish, but maybe give it a shot anyway? It's not going to hurt anything to submit it to one of the periodic short story contests, or maybe FFG would enjoy it. You might put it on some of the other 40k forums if you feel like sharing it, I'm sure other people would also appreciate it.I think having her become the new rogue trader would have been unfortunate, she's really not prepared for that world at all. On the other hand, being Doc Eldar is clearly well within her skillset.

# ? Aug 17, 2015 21:09

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Thank you! The assistant was previously never specified to be male or female, if you look back you'll see there's never a clue either way, I was careful about that. I hadn't initially planned on that being a twist, but somewhere along the way I got the idea.

I always planned on Doc Eldar dying; it's a 40K story, if there isn't tragedy then it doesn't suit the setting. I was actually influenced by the movie The Prestige, which beats the audience over the head with the principle that a magic trick has three parts: show the audience something, take it away, and bring it back. This made me think about all the classic fictional examples of characters dying and coming back, Gandalf and Aslan being the first two to come to mind - their deaths are meant to take the audience by surprise, and then their subsequent return is also meant to be a surprise. Of course, this idea has been so heavily used that by now, the audience expects dead characters to return, thus the shock value of stories where main characters die and don't come back, as in the Song of Ice and Fire books. So when I went to write Last Night On Call, I wanted it to be clear from the outset that things were going to turn out badly, hence the tone of the first couple of paragraphs. I was trying to anticipate what my audience would guess was going to happen, and I thought the traditional expectation would be that Doc Eldar would seemingly die, but actually survive, perhaps leaving a clue that he's off to have further adventures on another ship. So I wanted to make it very clear that he's dead, and show the body. But I still wanted my magic trick, and that's how I got the idea of "bringing him back" by turning the narrator into the new Doc Eldar.

For those who are interested in the stories, did this work? The only person I've shared this story with before now knew about the plot twists in advance, as I was running ideas past him as I wrote, so I haven't gotten feedback from anyone who read the story in one piece.

I'd like to get my stories out to a wider audience, not sure how I should go about that, though. Does Black Library read random submissions? I can only imagine that they get flooded with peoples' stories, if so.

# ? Aug 17, 2015 22:22

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

Kylaer posted:

For those who are interested in the stories, did this work? The only person I've shared this story with before now knew about the plot twists in advance, as I was running ideas past him as I wrote, so I haven't gotten feedback from anyone who read the story in one piece.

I'd like to get my stories out to a wider audience, not sure how I should go about that, though. Does Black Library read random submissions? I can only imagine that they get flooded with peoples' stories, if so.

Yes, it worked! I'd happily read a Ciaphas Cain style novel about Doc Eldar and his assistant. Don't know how you'd get it out to a wider audience tho without going through the Black Library: you know what GW are like with copyright.

# ? Aug 17, 2015 23:25

Arquinsiel: Jun 1, 2006; "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first."

God Bless Margaret Thatcher
God Bless England
RIP My Iron Lady

I kiiiiind of saw it coming, but I misinterpreted the details slightly and assumed the grenade was actually a pilfered soul stone and that Doc Eldar would survive somehow rather than let himself be devoured.

That was a massive tone shift from the "lol crazy boss" stories so far, but TBH you managed to make 40k combat interesting so well done there.

# ? Aug 17, 2015 23:39

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Pistol_Pete posted:

Yes, it worked! I'd happily read a Ciaphas Cain style novel about Doc Eldar and his assistant. Don't know how you'd get it out to a wider audience tho without going through the Black Library: you know what GW are like with copyright.

Thanks, but I don't know if I can make a novel-length story. Doc Eldar is better suited to short stories, I can't think of a way to write a plot that could carry through an entire novel. I will write more short stories, though.

Arquinsiel posted:

I kiiiiind of saw it coming, but I misinterpreted the details slightly and assumed the grenade was actually a pilfered soul stone and that Doc Eldar would survive somehow rather than let himself be devoured.

That was a massive tone shift from the "lol crazy boss" stories so far, but TBH you managed to make 40k combat interesting so well done there.

Yes, the tone shift was intentional. The story contains some things that no other Doc Eldar story will, such as him using lethal force, and being unable to save patients. To maintain the uniqueness I can't have them happen any other time. Same with Space Marines - in order for the Emperor's Child to be such an oh-poo poo-what-is-this to the narrator, she can't have ever encountered one before, which unfortunately means I can't write the story that someone suggested of Doc Eldar playing hide and seek with some Deathwatch marines (he can do this with conventional soldiers, though, and that's one of the future story ideas I have).

The grenade was a regular plasma grenade. The powder in the alembic, though, I was thinking that could be a ground-up spirit stone; it's what I had in mind when I wrote, but I didn't want to explicitly say it. Better if the exact mechanism stays unrevealed, I think, although I admit this is a judgment call; sometimes it's fun to really dig into the details of things, and sometimes it's better to let the audience come up with details in their own minds.

Glad you liked the combat, too. I didn't want to focus on the scenes of actual fighting, so I kept them brief, but I don't think anyone has written about the aftermath of a ship that's taken a real beating. ADB's written some excellent void warfare scenes, which I won't try to imitate, but they're always from the perspective of bridge crew or Space Marines, not the crew trying to put the pieces back together afterward.

# ? Aug 18, 2015 00:37

TheArmorOfContempt: Nov 29, 2012; Did I ever tell you my favorite color was blue?

berzerkmonkey posted:

Oh, yeah, I get that - King could have united the country, bringing about an unheard era of peace and prosperity, which could have seen humanity working together to reach the stars at a much earlier than anticipated date. I was just saying that I didn't remember it being explicitly stated as such.

To me that is the obvious course but I'd like to think no single man from the 2nd Millenium would be able to make such changes, considering how prophecy works in 40k(in that it is really unreliable) I like to think the Cabal had king killed on the off chance that one of his relatives hundreds of generations later would do something that would play a small part in The Emperors plan. Other things that raise questions would be "was The Emperor aware of the Cabals meddling at this stage or were his powers still developing?" "does The Emperors indirect methods up until the 30th Millenium signal that he maybe lacked the power to take direct action against the ruinous powers and alien forces such as The Cabal up to that point?".

I'm also hoping for something interesting regarding The Emperors origin, something like him actually being the culmination of an Old Ones experiment of some kind, and reason the Cabal has been meddling is because they can't accept the fact that their creators would put their plans to fight Chaos in the hands of a race so inherently flawed as man.

Also, your Doc Eldar stories have been really good, have you thought about sharing them with a BL author? ADB seems to maintain close contact with fans.

TheArmorOfContempt fucked around with this message at 02:03 on Aug 18, 2015

# ? Aug 18, 2015 01:12

Peztopiary: Mar 16, 2009; by exmarx

The Emperor being the collective shaman of Humanity is much better than any more alien meddling.

# ? Aug 18, 2015 05:18

CommissarMega: Nov 18, 2008; THUNDERDOME LOSER

Why wouldn't GW publish a Doc Eldar collection? Last I heard they've published the story of a (the? Dunno my Eldar fluff) Phoenix Lord, so why not a short colelction of Doc Eldar stories?

EDIT: Someone mentioned ADB keeping close contact with fans? I know he lurks /tg/ at least.

CommissarMega fucked around with this message at 15:35 on Aug 18, 2015

# ? Aug 18, 2015 15:33

Sandweed: Sep 7, 2006; All your friends are me.

I loved the stories, you seem to get 40K, keep writing them.

# ? Aug 18, 2015 18:45

VanSandman: Feb 16, 2011; SWAP.AVI EXCHANGER

The latest Doc Eldar almost worked. The problem is that it's two stories: one ends when the original Doc Eldar bites it (which is a great emotional climax) and the other is the aftermath. It needs to be split before the transformation. Maybe make it a 2 part story?

# ? Aug 18, 2015 20:46

Kharn_The_Betrayer: Nov 15, 2013; Fun Shoe

Always love the doc eldar stories. I really liked the brevity of your action and only the momments that have importance are given detailed descriptions. Keep on writing!

# ? Aug 18, 2015 21:29

Shockeh: Feb 24, 2009; Now be a dear and
fuck the fuck off.

Just to echo the love Kylaer, I've really enjoyed every single one of the Doc Eldar stories, and think you should carry on. They're hugely entertaining!

# ? Aug 19, 2015 09:32

Sandweed: Sep 7, 2006; All your friends are me.

Yeah, regular humans experiencing the horrors of the 40th millennium are my favorite WH40K stories.

# ? Aug 19, 2015 09:54

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Thank you all for your support! The next story is focusing on a more everyday experience and I'm hoping to explore the society a little with it, like I did with the AdMech baby story. It's not going to be as far on the whacky hijinks side of the spectrum, although I have some ideas for that kind of story, too.

If any of you have ideas or suggestions for things you'd like to see in future stories, I'd be happy to work those in, as well.

VanSandman: That's an interesting thought, but do you think the aftermath really contains enough content to be its own story? I do get what you're saying, they are distinct stories, but they follow immediately on each other without a break, whereas there's no chronological connection between the other stories. But I may write an end paragraph and a new beginning paragraph and see how they flow, thanks for the idea.

# ? Aug 19, 2015 14:47

Groetgaffel: Oct 30, 2011; Groetgaffel smacked the living shit out of himself doing 297 points of damage.

Sandweed posted:

Yeah, regular humans experiencing the horrors of the 40th millennium are my favorite WH40K stories.

Wanna echo this.
Something I thought about :

Kylaer posted:

But I remember, the details clear in my mind as if it happened an hour ago.

Is this a nod of foreshadowing to the transformation, or am I reading too much in to it?

Oh, and will the assistant take on some Eldar features in time following the transformation?
I think I'd like if she had some subtle changes; slightly elongated ears and fingers, got a bit more lithe, those kinds of changes.
Nothing that would prevent her from passing as fully human at first, and even second glance, but just enough to be a little bit off, the Uncanny Valley kind of deal.

Groetgaffel fucked around with this message at 09:21 on Aug 20, 2015

# ? Aug 20, 2015 09:17

Deptfordx: Dec 23, 2013

Well looks like Black Library are going full bore on GW marketing strategy and pricing.

http://www.blacklibrary.com/warhammer-40000/ragnar-blackmane-le.html

# ? Aug 20, 2015 13:01

Shockeh: Feb 24, 2009; Now be a dear and
fuck the fuck off.

I'd actually love to read ADB making Ragnar more interesting, but forty loving quid? Is it printed using saffron dye, on the finest skin of the child workers who bound it?

# ? Aug 20, 2015 13:09

Peztopiary: Mar 16, 2009; by exmarx

I was going to say I wouldn't even steal that, but then I saw who it was by and changed my mind. ADB, why you gotta toy with a hams heart like that?

# ? Aug 20, 2015 13:11

Miguel Prado: Nov 5, 2008; Don't worry, like they say " It's all good! "

Did anybody read those short stories ADB put out on the warhammer app about First Claw? How long/short are they?

# ? Aug 20, 2015 13:29

Deptfordx: Dec 23, 2013

Short, 10 minute read for all of them. It's ok but there's hardly time for anything to happen and it's basically yet another viewpoint of Istvann V which we're sure not short of.

Decent enought but I wouldn't go out of your way to track it down.

# ? Aug 20, 2015 13:44

Deptfordx: Dec 23, 2013

Shockeh posted:

I'd actually love to read ADB making Ragnar more interesting, but forty loving quid? Is it printed using saffron dye, on the finest skin of the child workers who bound it?

I'm actually curious how many 'limited edition' is. Couldn't see it on the website. I notice that they're trumpeting 'Less than 500 left!' for Cybernetica, the previous one.

If they start with a 1000, and it could be more, that doesn't really smack of exclusivity.

Also what if it's a smashing success. With Abnetts output dropping precipitously for GW, presumably because he gets better paid doing other stuff, ADB is considered their 'hot' author. Everyone runs out and tries to buy it. But they only have a 1000 copies to sell. Their own FAQ says they can't sell a reprint for 24 months. I mean isn't the point of highly priced exclusive books, that you think you can't sell a ton at a normal price (or it's a very expensive art book).

I'm also curious, although there's no way of knowing what his deal is, how the financials of this work out for ADB.

Edit: For those jonesing for some new Dan Abnett. He's written a no-poo poo Avengers superhero novel.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Avengers-Ev...+Rule+the+World

Can't vouch for the actual book, but i picked up the Graphic Audio,full cast + sfx, adaptation...

http://www.graphicaudiointernational.net/avengers-everybody-wants-to-rule-the-world.html

...and that was a lot of fun.

Deptfordx fucked around with this message at 14:07 on Aug 20, 2015

# ? Aug 20, 2015 14:01

Deptfordx: Dec 23, 2013

Also, and I realise I am wildly overanalysing here. Anything they release as limited edition can't actually be important right? Or at least not the Horus Heresy ones, if you can't reprint the book for 2 years.

Even at their reduced rate, that's what 5-6 full sized novels. None of which can rely on knowledge of stuff from the limited edition volume because so few people can have read it.

Imagine Know no Fear being limited editon then having to bring out Betrayer and Unremembered Empire before you could reprint it. A limited edition will almost by definition have to be a throw away book like Damnation of Pythos.

# ? Aug 20, 2015 16:51

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Groetgaffel posted:

Wanna echo this.
Something I thought about :
Is this a nod of foreshadowing to the transformation, or am I reading too much in to it?

Oh, and will the assistant take on some Eldar features in time following the transformation?
I think I'd like if she had some subtle changes; slightly elongated ears and fingers, got a bit more lithe, those kinds of changes.
Nothing that would prevent her from passing as fully human at first, and even second glance, but just enough to be a little bit off, the Uncanny Valley kind of deal.

I didn't mean that as foreshadowing, it's just an indicator of it being a horrible incident that got burned into the narrator's memory.

As for the narrator taking on some Eldar physical traits, that's something that could go either way. It's also a topic I'm not sure if I should explore - in most part, I want the last night on call to be the end of the Doc Eldar stories, with nothing chronologically following it, because I think it's a good note to end on. On the flip side, I do think it would be a lot of fun to write one or more stories that are half "present-day" events that the narrator is experiencing with the Inquisition, and half flashbacks to times of working with Doc Eldar, or possibly even into flashbacks to Doc Eldar's memories :getin:

# ? Aug 24, 2015 17:38

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Here's the next story! It's short, and as planned, it's more a slice-of-life piece, it's not very whacky.

quote:

Let me tell you a little story about the most terrifying boss I've ever had. Every underling has stories about their bosses, and it's no rare thing to be scared of those higher up the ladder, is it? I'm sure the Monsignor Jeremias at times struck fear into everyone under his command, given his unpredictable whims and absolute power aboard the ship; for me, it was the result of one of those whims that made my life a terror. The Monsignor had hired, as chief of surgery, an alien; humanoid in body, but indisputably inhuman in thinking. His name was equally inhuman, and despite trying I was never able to pronounce it. I called him Doc Eldar.

The alien had a strange set of priorities. He was utterly dedicated to part of the surgeon's craft, namely completing surgeries successfully, saving lives and fixing wounds. But the other part - making the experience tolerable to the patient - he neglected entirely, forbidding the use of anesthetics during his cases, making even the most straightforward procedure into an excruciating ordeal. I can only assume that any patient who underwent surgery by the xeno would have nightmares about it for the rest of their life...but I cannot deny that he completed surgeries successfully that no-one else would have even attempted, insuring that his patients - his victims - would be able to have those nightmares.

As Doc Eldar's tenure aboard the ship progressed, he became known among the crew. First as a collection of rumors, spread by those who came under his care - some claimed he was just a psychopathic man, others that he was some kind of crazed magos from the Mechanicus. The first whispers of "xeno" were surprisingly long in coming, probably because the idea was so outlandish, but as he performed more scene responses, as he was seen by more bystanders who, unlike his patients, did not have their perceptions clouded by agony, the truth spread. I wondered, now and then, if a mob would try to bring Doc Eldar down, but I think the fear was too strong - both of him personally, and of the Monsignor, by whose warrant the xeno was aboard the ship. And there was more to Doc Eldar's reputation than fear; there was an edge of awe in the stories surrounding him, too, as reports spread of miraculous survivals brought about by his skill.

One of those miracles happened only because of the xeno's vigilance - he didn't simply wait for cases to be brought to him, but sought them out, with the focus of a predatory animal. He monitored the ship's communication system, piecing together information to lead him to his prey.

I recall that I was scribing a letter home. The ship was traveling through the Warp, and our destination was still several weeks off, so I was in no hurry to finish it. Sending personal communications by astropath was prohibitively expensive, of course, but carrying data packets and communiques is part of the role of every commercial ship, and at port it usually wasn't difficult to find a vessel headed in the appropriate direction, so your message would arrive within a few months, at a price even a menial could afford. Not that menials sent a lot of mail, of course, since most of them were born aboard the ship that would be their home for life.

Doc Eldar looked at me from where he was standing beside the trauma suite's data terminal. "Something is wrong. Prepare to move."

"What's happening? Are we getting dispatched?" I immediately went for the scene box; if the xeno said to move, I moved. But I did ask.

"No. But a morgue retrieval team has been ordered to a tram station on cargo deck two. As has a priest." His eyes narrowed. "And the tram has not left on schedule. Something has happened."

Those were all the clues he needed, and his assessment was right - something indeed had happened.

The platform of the station was occupied by several dozen of the ship's menial workers, mostly clustered at its edge, where two tram cars stood connected, both full of cargo - freshly loaded, I assumed. A few workers stood further away; I saw clenched fists, tight expressions, all the signs of bottled-up emotion. I didn't see the priest or the morgue team, we must have gotten there first. I also couldn't see what had happened until the crowd parted, shying away as the xeno approached.

There was a man down between the tram cars, a worker, probably in his twenties, and I saw immediately the reason his coworkers were so rightfully upset. The couplers between the cars had fastened to each other - and the man was caught between them, the metal enfolding his thighs.

I'd heard of this happening twice before; Doctor Bisko had been clear that it was not a survivable injury. There was enough space between the couplers that it wasn't an instant amputation, but all the tissue was crushed to ruination, and as soon as the couplers were released and the "tourniquet" they provided removed, death by hemorrhage would follow within seconds.

But he wasn't dead yet. And not only was he alive, he was fully conscious, and the expression of absolute terror on his face showed that he understood exactly what the situation was. He was gripping the hands of two of his fellow workers who knelt beside him, his knuckles bloodlessly white. He caught sight of the xeno as he approached, and his mouth worked silently several times before he managed to produce a sound. "Doctor. The doctor's here."

One of the men kneeling beside him, considerably older than the victim, nodded but didn't look around. "Right. Doctor's here, he'll give you something, you won't...feel anything." The man's voice broke as he said the words. "I'll be right here with you, all the way, son."

"No. You will need to move," the xeno intoned, "to give me room to work." He crouched, leaning between the two workers, who both recoiled away from him, and he went eye-to-eye with the injured man. "Thank you, foolish human. You have made my day less routine." I was behind him, so I couldn't see if he smiled as he said it, but I'm betting that he did. Doc Eldar's teeth looked as sharp as his knife, so his smile was a terror in its own right.

As he rose again and turned towards me, ready to issue directions, the victim's father did something very few people ever did, and caught Doc Eldar by the sleeve. "Doctor. Can you really save him? Nobody ever lives through this." He was hopeful, and fearful at the same time - the thought that the new hope might be a false one must have been tearing at him.

"Can and will," the alien answered, before looking at me. "Prepare four trauma infusion lines."

There were no convenient IV poles to hang the bags on, so I recruited a couple of the menials to assist me in moving a supply rack into a suitable position. Doc Eldar wasn't placing his needles yet; the site supervisor had drawn his attention, and was concerned about the situation.

"Doctor, this tram needs to go, we're already causing delays throughout the system," he complained.

"I will not create unnecessary delays," the xeno replied. "Only necessary ones."

"But I can't hold them up!" The supervisor looked miserable. "I got the deck coordinator to agree to a delay so the priest could get here before we uncoupled him, but I can't stop the whole transit system because of this!"

"You cannot, true. But I can." With a flick of his wrist, Doc Eldar presented a many-hued ident strip to the supervisor. "The ship's regulations stipulate that in situations of medical emergency, I have authority to supercede the orders of anyone except the active officer of the watch, the chief of security, and the Monsignor himself. Show this to the coordinator and explain that this is my call. If they wish, they can discuss it with me. Afterward."

I expect you've spent your share of time shipboard, but you haven't made a life of it. For menials - the unskilled workers who form the lowest rating of the ship's complement, below even the specialized manual laborers like the longshoremen - it is a fact of existence that they are expendable. Menials often spend their entire lives on a single ship; they're born, raised, live, and die without setting foot planetside. Conditions for menials aboard Jeremias's ship were better than on the overwhelming majority of other vessels, I should point out; none of the ship's population went hungry, and since the vessel itself was barely half a millennium old, and maintained at the state of the art, living and working conditions were relatively safe, no worse than many planetary workers experienced. But I emphasize relatively, compared to ships where menials were kept in line with whips and starvation. Work injuries among the menial population created the largest portion of the patients we saw in the trauma suite, and it was never a surprise to read in the daily ship's bulletin of one or more of them being killed on the spot by even worse mishaps - particularly in port, when the loading and unloading of cargoes was in full swing. I was always reminded of how fortunate I was, to have been born into a family of medical professionals and to have the opportunity to become one in turn. Whereas this young man was born a menial...and if not for the xeno, would have died a menial then and there.

The xeno was crouching by his patient again, arranging his equipment on a square of sterile paper out of the scene box. I finished spiking the fourth bag of blood-surrogate fluid and held out the lines, one after another, as Doc Eldar placed his IV catheters, one in each arm and one in each jugular. The young man gave little yelps at the bite of each over-sized needle, but he was clearly soaring on adrenaline, and wasn't feeling pain like a normal person would - if not for that, he surely would have already been unconscious.

Doc Eldar surveyed the scene, knife dangling at ease in his right hand. "Everyone without a specific task needs to stand at least five meters away while we are working. And you," he added, stabbing a finger out towards one of the men, "need to come to the hospital later today to get that abscess drained." The man, I belatedly noticed, had an angry red swelling on the side of his neck, below the angle of his jaw.

"It's, uh, it's fine, doc," the man said, turning and starting to move away, as quickly as he could without obviously running.

Doc Eldar glanced at me. "Retrieve my knife." Something inane flashed through my mind, along the lines of It's in your hand, then his arm blurred, and the overhead lights glittered off the blade as it flew. The fleeing man shrieked, clapping a hand against his neck, and the knife quivered to a halt in the upright truss of a cargo rack. I handed the man a thick gauze pad as I passed him - he took his hand away from his incision, and I saw that the cut had released a large amount of pus, and relatively little blood. I wiped the blade clean with a solvent cloth as I returned it to the xeno. "That abscess pocket should be packed with a gauze wick. I will have to find him again later," he said. I knew it was no idle statement.

There were no more distractions forthcoming as we faced our work. The crowd had drawn back per the xeno's instruction, and every eye was on him. But this was not a case where he could simply start work immediately - there needed to be a clear plan of action, and as expected, he had one. He sent the supervisor to call for a stretcher team and tasked workers to stand ready to uncouple the cars and to move the car in front of the patient away, while I secured a strap around the man's chest to keep him from falling down when his support was removed. He was staring at me as I worked.

"Am I gonna make it? Truly?" he asked.

"Yes. He will save you." I believed it, too, despite the fact that to any other physician this would be an impossibility.

"He's not human. Why's he a doctor?"

"That, I don't know." It was a question I had pondered many times, and its answer remained unknown to me. What I did know was that Doc Eldar must have heard us, even though he was currently crawling underneath the tram car to get in position for the decoupling - but he added nothing to my answer.

Everything of mine was ready - I would open all of the fluid lines immediately before the decoupling, replacing them as they emptied and supplying the xeno with instruments. The workers were in position to move the car, and the xeno was working his way into position down by the patient's knees; a few moments later, I heard his voice. "Begin in three. Two. One. Now."

Even as he'd said "three" I had begun opening my lines, and they were pouring fluid into the patient's veins by the time the coupling mechanism unlocked with a thud. The labor crew hauled, pulling the car away, and as it moved, the patient gasped - not screamed, just gasped, and as his head lolled back I knew his pressure must have just dropped to the floor, as he poured blood out through the ruins of both legs.

I saw the xeno's hands before the tram car had been pulled away far enough to reveal anything else. He had a pair of angioplasty balloons with him, and his fingers picked through the gruesome wounds, seeking the femoral arteries. How he could tell what anything was, amid the crushed flesh and pouring blood, I have no idea - but he slid the catheters into something near simultaneously, triggered their inflation, and the bleeding slowed. Almost stopped, almost, other than oozing.

Doc Eldar's head came into view. "Slow down your infusions once you reach two liters, do not overload his system. The iliacs are currently occluded and that is not a viable long term solution, but it will temporize. He can be moved to the platform now."

There was no shortage of willing hands to help move the young man away from the tram track. The patient had passed out, but the pulse in his wrist was strong.

"These are not ideal conditions for limb replacement surgery," Doc Eldar stated, looking around the platform. "The remainder of the procedure will be performed at the hospital. The legs themselves cannot be salvaged, augmetics will be needed."

"You saved him." The patient's father had amazement in his voice. "You stopped the trams to save him." To disrupt the tasks of the ship like that to save the life of one menial was unheard of.

"I signed the Monsignor's contract. Saving lives is my foremost priority," the xeno replied.

The reasons why Doc Eldar had signed that contract might be a mystery, but one thing was certain: he took it seriously. He didn't forget his earlier pledge, either; as soon as we finished scrubbing clean after grafting augmetic caps onto the man's leg stumps, he gestured towards the door. "We must find that man with the abscess. He risks incomplete healing of the infection if the wound is not packed."

"How are you going to find him? We never got his name."

"Even after an hour, I can track a staphylococcus abscess. The odor is distinct."

We caught the man at his table in one of the low-deck mess halls. Doc Eldar left no task incomplete.

This story is one I've had vaguely in my head for a long time, and today I sat down and hammered it out. I am very much an amateur writer - I've never had formal training in writing fiction, I don't make outlines, and generally I just start at the beginning and write through to the end. If I have inspiration for something, I think it usually goes well; if I don't have inspiration, it's a real struggle, and for this one I didn't have any clever ideas for how to end it, so I just kind of let the curtain fall.

I don't have any firm ideas of what to write next, so if any of you have things you'd like to see written, please let me know.

Kylaer fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Aug 28, 2015

# ? Aug 28, 2015 02:53

Arquinsiel: Jun 1, 2006; "There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first."

God Bless Margaret Thatcher
God Bless England
RIP My Iron Lady

What's missing from that, the one thing, is firing Chekov's gun.

Doc Eldar should start unwrapping some gauze and head off to find abcess boy.

# ? Aug 28, 2015 03:26

SavTargaryen: Sep 11, 2011

A story where Doc Eldar meets the Inquisitor he eventually winds up with, that'd be pretty good foreshadowing. I mean, it'd give the backstory as to why they'd be interested, and also you could deal with some cool xenos weaponry injuries.

# ? Aug 28, 2015 04:49

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Arquinsiel posted:

What's missing from that, the one thing, is firing Chekov's gun.

Doc Eldar should start unwrapping some gauze and head off to find abcess boy.

Yessss, you're right! I edited the ending and I think it works better, thanks!

SavTargaryen posted:

A story where Doc Eldar meets the Inquisitor he eventually winds up with, that'd be pretty good foreshadowing. I mean, it'd give the backstory as to why they'd be interested, and also you could deal with some cool xenos weaponry injuries.

I can work with this, definitely. I don't know if it will be the same inquisitor that the narrator ends up working for, but a story about the Inquisition hunting Doc Eldar within the ship, that will be fun to write :getin:

(One of the rules I'm working with is that Doc Eldar never uses a weapon except in the final story, so there won't be any shoot-outs between him and his pursuers, but there can definitely be a scene where they blast away at him, catch some bystanders with stray shots, and then he has to double back after evading them in order to treat the wounded)

# ? Aug 28, 2015 14:48

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# ? May 18, 2024 16:17

SavTargaryen: Sep 11, 2011

Oh, I meant more like if it's a radical, THEY might be under xenos weapon fire that no one else knows how to treat or what have you. It was also late and I wasn't clear, my bad!

# ? Aug 28, 2015 17:21

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